Dralion
Directed by Guy Caron. Set by Stéphane Roy. Costumes by François Barbeau. Lighting by Luc Lafortune. Music composed by Violaine Corradi. Choreography by Julie Lachance. Sound design by Guy Desrochers. Presented by Cirque du Soleil at Suffolk Downs through September 16.

To me, a big top with no elephants is like a circus without, well, sunshine. Of course, the Montreal-based Cirque du Soleil has become an international institution without benefit of our animal friends, relying instead on the language of the human body to tell its stories. And the dralion after which its latest extravaganza is named is a mythical fusion of dragon and lion — you can’t just round up a few and teach them to jump through hoops or breathe fire on command.

Cirque du Soleil have brought at least five dralions to Suffolk Downs, but they’re hardly the centerpiece of this spectacular show. The backdrop is a mammoth metallic wall, 25 feet high and 60 feet wide, to whose perforated aluminum surface performers cling like a troupe of spidermen as they watch their fellows on stage. Overhead hover three huge aluminum rings, one of which (they call it the " Sun " ) rotates, tilts, descends, and ascends, often taking performers with it. And there’s a concept of sorts: the bright costumes are color-coded to represent the four elements: red for fire, blue for air (sky), green for water (ocean), ocher for earth.

But what defines Dralion, what makes it different from the two previous shows Cirque du Soleil has brought to Boston (Saltimbanco in 1993, Alegría in 1995), is the presence of 37 Chinese acrobats. They are, in a word, flabbergasting. Zhao Yashi balances in a handstand on a kind of walking stick and moves her body through eye-popping backbends and other contortions, all without a break in form; it makes the gymnastics you see at the Olympics look elementary. Han Yan, Zhu Sha, Wang Dongguo, and Zhang Hongwei perform a double trapeze act, the duos swinging back and forth in counterpoint, that’s a miracle of timing. " Teeterboard " is the usual flipping of acrobats onto human totem poles — but here the pole can be four women high, or three with the top one holding a chair. (Then there’s the woman who does her flip on six-foot stilts.) The base of the human pyramids in " Ballet on Lights " is formed by women standing on pointe on light bulbs imbedded in the stage. I imagine the toe shoes must have been adapted to fit the bulbs; even so, it’s an astonishing feat of balance (the French name for this act is " Équilibre sur pointes " ). " Hoop Diving " is another circus standard, but these acrobats don’t just dive head- or feet-first — they curl into a ball (easy going through one hoop, but not two or three), or straddle-roll. One man actually strides through. And " Skipping Ropes " scarcely conveys the dizzying fugue of jumpropes going every which way, of skipping human pyramids, of teams who skip even as they swing the rope for other skippers. Here again the French title, " Cordes à danser, " is more evocative.

Being new to Cirque du Soleil, I was left wondering what the home team does, as opposed to the Chinese guests. Viktor Kee, from Ukraine, could pass for Chinese (I mean his skills, not his appearance): he juggles as many as seven tiny balls with his hands, his feet, and every other part of his anatomy. He can even pick out the one red ball from among its six white fellows. The " Aerial Pas de Deux " a romantic ballet in which Juliana Neves and Igor Arefiev whirl around the stage on long blue sashes suspended from an overhead ring, makes up in poetry what it lacks in pyrotechnics.

The glue that holds all this together is less edifying. Three clowns dressed in variously ill-fitting tuxedos " start " the show by running about with sealing tape and a bridal veil and embarrassing audience members; this is a funny curtain raiser, but on press night it went on for 25 minutes. The clowns reappear at frequent intervals, speaking in mostly unintelligible Italian and working with a " volunteer " from the audience (eventually you do find out whether he is or isn’t a plant, and the entire sequence becomes a bit of a disappointment); a little of this goes a long way. The music, by Violaine Corradi, is Eurotrance delivered at earsplitting decibel levels (I was glad I had earplugs); for some acts the pounding rhythms are appropriate, but it’s all too much of the same thing. The dancers, apart from Henriette Gbou’s jiggy Gaya (Earth), contribute nothing, and the harmony of the elements promised by the color scheme never materializes. I was left trying to remember the French word for " over-produced. "

No faulting the dralions, however. At one point, three of these creatures (each a two-person team) get themselves onto a single large wooden ball and roll it up and down a teeterboard. You won’t see three elephants do that.

Issue Date: August 23-30, 2001